The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar

Calendar

Citylab:

The 13-month calendar worked so well at Kodak that the company used it until 1989, 57 years after Eastman committed suicide (a businessman to the end, his ashes are buried at Kodak’s old industrial complex). “I loved it,” says John Cirocco, a former Kodak employee who worked at the company in the late ’80s as a tech advisor. “It was a major piece of financial applications, and from a financial perspective it made the ability to compare sales periods a hell of a lot easier.”

Besides the occasional carryover (Kodak’s 1989 financial year began on December 26, 1988), overlapping a 13-month calendar with the Gregorian one came with surprisingly few hiccups. “After I got hired, it took about a week to adjust to,” Cirocco tells us. “When I first got there they explained it to me and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is brilliant!'” In fact, the former Kodak employee remains fond of the calendar to this day. “I’ve tried to recommend it at two places I’ve worked at since then. The feedback is always, ‘We can’t, this [12-month calendar] is how it’s always been done.'”

The Last Jedi (Encore Episode 156)

Encore 156

On this week’s episode of Encore I am joined by special guest Thomas Nassiff to talk about one of our favorite topics: Star Wars. This episode is full of spoilers all about Star Wars: The Last Jedi, so I would highly recommend you see the movie before listening. We give our thoughts on the film, break down favorite and least favorite scenes, and talk about catching up with favorite characters, both old and new. Also porgs.

I wanted to get this episode out before the holiday weekend so you’d have something to listen to while visiting family and friends. I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday and a Merry Christmas, thank you to everyone who reads and supports this website on a daily basis. I truly appreciate it.

Read More “The Last Jedi (Encore Episode 156)”

A Few Tips for Podcast Editing in Logic

Bret Terpstra:

Varispeed is a feature I didn’t realize existed until recently, but had always wished for. It lets you speed up the audio playback so you can basically listen through your podcast at 2x while editing.

Once the toolbar item is enabled, just use ⌃F (Control-F) to toggle it on and off. (I think that’s the default, but I might have edited that one. We’ll get to that below.)

Once it’s up, ensure that the type is set to Speed Only (click the top line for a menu), then double click on the percentage to edit it anywhere between -50% and 100% (100% being double normal playback speed). While playing back you can just hit the shortcut to speed up and then toggle it back off to return to normal speed. Scrubbing!

Some great stuff here.

Join the Dark Side: Bringing Dark Mode to the Main Website

Dark Mode
UPDATE • Dec 18, 2024

A new version of this page, with updated screenshots, can be found here.

It’s fitting that on release week for Star Wars: The Last Jedi I can bring the Dark Side to the main website. One of my favorite supporter perks in the forum has been Dark Mode — a dark slate colored theme — and I’m excited to be able to bring this color palette to the main website as well. I love our white, grey, and blue color scheme, but at night I almost always switch over to the dark theme while browsing the website on my phone. However, I’d often move over to the main site to read an article and the white contrast would be a rude awakening for my eyes. No more! Supporters can now activate Dark Mode on the main website via their supporter options page or in the forum preferences. If you’re not a supporter yet, join now to get Dark Mode.

I’ve included some screen shots below of what the website and forums look like in Dark Mode, for those curious. I think it maintains my main design goals: simple, clean, and focused on readability, while adding a new flavor to the overall feel of the website.

Read More “Join the Dark Side: Bringing Dark Mode to the Main Website”

I wrote up a holiday gift guide for this year on chorus.fm, this delicious hot sauce is on it! If you’re looking for something to get a loved one check out a few of my recommendations. http://chr.us/gguide17

2017 Holiday Gift Guide

I can’t believe it’s already December, but here we are. Like last year, I wanted to steal an idea I’ve seen on other websites and put together a few gift ideas that I think are worthy of your time. I have also updated my recommendations posts for movies, tv shows, books, software, podcasts, headphones, and miscellaneous stuff around the house, so the things on this list will be more focused on stuff not included in those posts and more geared toward things I’ve come across in the past year or so and think would make good gifts. As always, I only recommend things I’ve personally used and loved.

I used my Amazon affiliate link when the product showed up there, which gives our website a slight percentage back if you make a purchase, and therefore helps fund our continued existence. I hope you’ll find something cool, and feel free to drop your own recommendations in the comments.

If you’d like to get me a gift, becoming a supporting member or gifting another user a supporting membership for a year would mean the world to me.

Read More “2017 Holiday Gift Guide”

Bridging the Forum and the Website’s Supporter Systems

Today I’m excited to announce I’ve completed the work on bridging our community and the main website’s supporter systems. Now, if you’re a supporting member of the forum community you can use your username and password to login on the content side of the website to view supporter only content (like my first impressions), manage your payment options, turn off advertisements site-wide, and soon gain access a special Dark Mode for the main website that matches perfectly with the Dark Mode of the forums.

And don’t forget: you don’t have to be a community member to be a supporter of the website! You can join right now for only $3 a month and help support this website and independent publishing. It’s because of readers like you that I can keep running this website. I can’t thank each and every one of you enough for your support over the past two years.

It’s funny how a project like this, which doesn’t end up having many outward facing changes, can be a massive undertaking behind the scenes. But now that it’s done, the foundation is better set for a bunch of cool things we can do in the future and the system is much more robust for handling payments and login credentials for our growing community.

If you are already a supporter, you don’t have to make any changes if you don’t want to, everything will just keep working as it has been. If you’d like to move away from PayPal and to the new credit card based system, you can do that here. Again, it’s totally optional to make that change if you want.

If anyone has any questions at all, feel free to drop me an email or message me in the forums.

Thanksgiving Week Is the Event College Basketball Needs

The Ringer

Mark Titus, writing at The Ringer:

The most absurd week ever of regular-season college basketball came to a close Sunday night/early Monday morning when no. 4 Michigan State held no. 9 North Carolina to 45 points, no. 16 Texas A&M blew out no. 10 USC in Los Angeles, and no. 1 Duke erased a 17-point second-half deficit to beat no. 7 Florida. There’s no way of fact-checking whether this was actually the most absurd regular-season week in college basketball history, of course, but I don’t think we need to bother. Shoot, these past seven days have been so wild that the “regular season” qualifier might not even be necessary. Wichita State’s comeback to beat Cal in the first round of the Maui Invitational happened last Monday, yet I could easily be convinced that it took place a decade ago because of all that’s transpired since.

The Voices in Blue America’s Head

Crooked Media

The New York Times:

“Pod Save America” scored its first million-listener episode within its first several weeks, and it now averages 1.5 million listeners per show — about as many people as Anderson Cooper draws on prime-time CNN. Their podcast has come to occupy a singular perch in blue America; where an NPR tote bag once signified a certain political persuasion and mind-set, in the age of Trump, it’s a “Friend of the Pod” T-shirt.

Those numbers are insane. That said, the podcast is one of the few things that I look forward to each week to help navigate this current hellscape. It’s great.